We have several support issues ongoing that have impacted many of you and I would like to provide a status update on these issues and offer some explanation of why these issues exist. I will do my best to keep this short, but there is information you should be aware of.

Email migration:

On the systems side, the email migration went smoothly. There were very few Exchange mail issues. However we did find some user-side Outlook and Outlook for Web issues that affected many users. The user-side issues affected many more users than did the Exchange server-side of the equation.

We have identified four issues in email that have been problematic: (5 issues are listed below)

The inability to authenticate in web mail by going to owa.archdpdx.org. This issue is due to the fact that many of us have in the past been able to authenticate by using only our username in the username field. The system was never configured for that type of authentication and at this point we do not know for sure how and why you were able to authenticate that way. The proper and configured method to login is archdpdx\username for your user name. Please continue to use that login procedure. This issue is resolved.

The inability to authenticate to Outlook client: We have this resolved for most systems except for those systems running Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2016. . There appears to be a Microsoft error that prevents authentication. We believe that deleting your account and re-establishing it is the shortest way to resolve this issue with Microsoft Outlook 2010. I am attaching a document that will enable you to create a new Archdiocese account. Since all email is stored on the Exchange server, you will NOT lose any email by performing this procedure. Please read this entire document before modifying your accounts. We have NOT been able to reliably recreate this issue, or test it's reliably, so please let us know how this works for you. You can update your existing support ticket for this or if you have not created one, you can use the information at the end of this document to create an account on our Help Desk system to submit a ticket. You are our eyes and ears on this issue.

For some of you running Microsoft Outlook 2016, there have also been an authentication issue. We are investigating this issue and will have a resolution for you shortly, and will send out an additional support bulletin as information becomes available.

For some, there was a period of time where your account was migrating to the new server and, for short time (which could be up to 12 hours), the target Exchange server was set to a maximum mailbox size of 2 Gigabytes. For many of us, our mailbox size exceeds that size. This has been corrected for all users, but any mail that bounced back to the sender with this type of error would have to be resent by you. This was an Exchange mail server configuration that did not affect many users.

For those users internal to the Pastoral Center, there has been a temporary loss of email lists impacting our ability to send email to these lists of users. This is an Exchange-side issue we are in the process of correcting at this time.

Not listed above are some scattered reports of some Outlook clients not receiving incoming mail where there is mail coming in on mobile mail clients like Apple Mail or Outlook for iOS. We are investigating the cause of this email issue.

There are also scattered reports of outgoing mail to archdpdx recipients that are bouncing back; that issue is also being worked at this time.

The next section relates to access to department and individual users' files on a certain file server.

Concurrently with the migration of the email, we had a server failure of the past several days. This particular file server provides file space for department files as well as user specific files such as desktop files, icons and shortcuts, my documents and others. This file server outage was unplanned and occurred concurrently with the mail cutover to the new email server.

Department files: These files have been migrated to the new replacement file server. You should be able to again access your department and "common files" after a system reboot. Please let us know if this does not restore your access to your department documents via the Help Desk application.

User specific files: These files have been migrated to the new replacement server. You will not have access to these files until the file mappings have been replaced on your desktop. Ironically, your shortcuts to the common files are included in your user specific files. So, the impact is if you do not have access to your user files, you will not have access to any department or common files. If you are not able to access your user files, please reboot your system and you should regain access to your desktop, documents and shortcuts. Please let us know if this does not restore your access to your department documents via the Help Desk application.

Needless to say, this has saturated our ability to support all of you in the typical timely manner we expect from our IT Team. This file server failure could not have happened at a more unfortunate time. We are working to get all issues resolved for all of you so IT can become "invisible" to the user.

We are working through all this and will resolve all access issues soon as we can. We truly appreciate your patience and understanding as we resolve all these issues.

John Cooper
IT Consultant

Finally, please contact only the Help Desk for your issues. This is how we track and provide accountability for IT support performance.